


the end of the world as we know it

by VastDerp



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Generic Veilstuck AU, Jossed, Multi, but that's okay, jossed rull hard
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-06-14
Updated: 2011-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-20 10:02:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 15,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/211563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VastDerp/pseuds/VastDerp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Survivors: Meet Up.</p><p>In which VD picks up various characters, bangs them together like Barbie dolls, and writes about the noises they make. Now with dreambubble foaming action!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. in a hurry with the furies breathing down your neck

> Be the Mage of Doom.

The noise when they come through is unreal. A brain-vibrating thunder of blurry apocalypse that gets down under your skin and makes your bones ache and your ears ring. Tomorrow everything will sound a tiny bit muffled, and you'll be extra jumpy because that's just what you need to make life complete right now, to be deaf too.

For now, though, it's all about the blast. And the skin of your face and the little hairs on your arms are prickling in small warm waves. Nobody's holding your arm right now, so you resist that backward scramble you desperately want to make, and let the explosion of sound and energy roll over you. You smell ozone. You smell something like flowers. You smell sweat and fear and stale air and then fresh air coming from the blast. It dries the sweat on your brow and you think, _somewhere there's a nice spring breeze, and we're getting the leftovers._

For a moment you think it's the demon finally coming to finish the job your insane teammates started. KK's weird chess piece friend, but not the same one. His twin from another universe with a ring from a different session. A ring that makes him fucking invincible, isn't that great? But the light that's making your exposed skin heat up must not be evil acid green, because nobody is shrieking in panic. To your right, KK hisses a curse under his breath, but that's all. Kanaya and Terezi are somewhere to your left, silent. Not the demon, then.

So you remain where you are and wait for shit to make sense again. You have a feeling you'll be standing here a while.

The roar diminishes and finally dies. The wind weakens to a puff of disturbed air that lifts your fringe and then it's gone too. There's a commotion and a yelp and a thump from the center of the lab. You hear voices--new voices, speaking a language you understand. This makes you briefly nervous, but you're pretty sure they aren't _your_ Voices, with a capital V, the ones you've only just gotten rid of, because the imminently deceased have never sounded this cheerful. There are strangers in the lab, emitting a babble of high-pitched greetings and sobs and scrambles that sound like a race of shoes squeaking lightly across the rusty metal floor of the lab, and the almost-familiar sounds of your teammates' own shoes are getting quieter as they move away from you and toward the newcomers in their aura of fresh air from another world.

Oh shit, it's the human kids.

You can't sort out how many of them, though. Tilting first one side of your head toward the noise, then the other, you wonder which side of your brain is better for sorting out sounds. You figure you should really be an expert on brains by now. Wasn't your entire planet in the Medium one huge throbbing mass of the goddamn things? And fire. (And wasn't that just the greatest combination ever. You still have some shirts that stink of brain-charcoal and singed cotton, locked away somewhere in your inventory.) None of this does you any good. You make a mental note to find out more about neurology as soon as you have spare time, and then remember you won't be doing any reading anytime soon. The guy who builds mechanical eyes is in a bunch of pieces in the ectobiology lab, and you're pretty sure you're going to die before you figure out how to write your name in troll Braille anyway.

Oh well.

You want to be anywhere but here. This was never your thing, this plan to work together with the humans and be best buddies or whatever. You guess you forgive them for what happened, but that doesn't mean you want to slobber all over their weird pink faces just because they found a way through to your universe. Let Terezi handle the licking fetish thing. (This last thought finally gets you to take a few shuffling steps backward, until the cold steel of the wall is flat against your back and you have something to lean against. It's nice to have something solid at your back.) Besides, you don't know where the door is without somebody to lead you, and you have no interest in fumbling around in plain view of these nonsensical chattering aliens until you find it for yourself.

The humans have weird voices. Half of what they say sounds like bird calls to you. It's nothing like their movies. Just raw pressured babbling, high-pitched laughter and a sudden hysterical sobbing in the middle of it all that gets quickly hushed by a soothing voice--that's Kanaya, anyone who's ever lost their shit on Alternia would recognize her voice--and everyone else goes silent like they're sharing some kind of moment of solidarity or something.

There's a wet sniffle and several clearing throats and a tentative murmur from a lower voice. A nervous laugh from one of the new arrivals. Terezi cackles and you hear a skin-on-skin clapping sound. A louder voice cuts over the others. "Where's my rape whistle? Jesus, I just got here and I'm covered in bitches."

The skin all down your spine goes electric and chilly. That's the one called Dave, their time player. The one who wired the money after your session went to shit. You've watched him plenty, but this is the first time you've heard him. He sounds... really young.

> Sollux: Be subjective third-person narrator.

"You're Kanaya," Rose says, and tries to push her dark lips into a smile. Before her stands her first example of the Troll race: tall, slender and elegant, a confident gray ink wash sketch of a girl just becoming a woman, draped in a wine colored evening gown. She would be overdressed on Earth. Here she's a splash of smooth color amid ludicrous jags of broken science fiction laboratory machinery and tangles of dim rattling pipes. Her skin is luminescent, a flashy contrast to the flickering overhead banks of fluorescent lighting that bathes the room around their little group. Kanaya Maryam is a poised alien doll of a girl, and Rose admires how the short licks of velvet-black hair sweep back from her high brow and those huge, curiously gentle yellow eyes.

And she has horns, just as advertised. Rose is impressed, but she remembers how their last conversation went and is on her guard nevertheless.

"Welcome to the Veil, Rose," Kanaya replies, and there's real warmth in her voice. As she speaks those white flashes of teeth draw Rose's gaze away from her eyes and she is reminded of the way animal eyes flash in the darkness, a feral promise half-hidden in the dark. "I am so glad you four made it safely through."

Rose isn't sure what to say next. Part of it is that Kanaya's teeth have unnerved her, and also she's been on edge since this plan was put into motion. _These are not optimal conditions for proper interspecies discourse,_ she thinks with despair. Being wrong-footed during a first contact situation is the worst thing. She should say something, Rose decides, and regain control of this conversation.

"You're glowing," she blurts, and feels her face flush with horror. _This is the worst day of my life,_ she thinks, and is immediately horrified when the troll in the elegant gown begins to laugh softly, and places two small gloved hands on Rose's shoulders in welcome.

\--

Karkat watches John pull himself up from the floor. Coming through, he somehow managed to trip over his own stupid oversized teenage feet and go sprawling. He made his glamorous entrance on his knees with his glasses halfway down his nose and slightly askew. It's all Karkat can do to keep from bursting out in triumphant gales of laughter. _This_ is the Heir? This grinning, bucktoothed child? He extends one hand to help John up, finds it taken with absolutely no hesitation, and bites back an insult as he gives a steady pull.

He's got no energy left for berating anyone, even John (who seems to ask for it twice as hard). Tomorrow, yeah. He'll have the heart for it then. But right now he's just glad the stupid asshole made it alive and in one piece, and brought the others through safely. He can appreciate good leadership when he sees it, even if it's wearing a stupid cartoony hood that drags on the ground behind him.

John dusts off his pants and watches the gray cloud settle. It doesn't help. The knees and probably the ass of his cool godtier uniform are black with filth. (That's lame, comic book superheroes never have to deal with stains.) He looks at Karkat and smiles, but they don't speak at first. They just take each other in, and Karkat notes with a certain satisfaction that he's just a little bit taller than the human.

Then John starts to giggle, and Karkat sees red. "What the fuck," he asks, "is so funny?"

"You're real," John says, happily. "You're real and you're an actual alien. This is _so cooool."_

"And that's funny because...?"

John turns Karkat's bewilderment to horror with a massive hug, which he has been saving for this occasion, and Karkat feels his shriek of outrage die in his throat. He cannot wrestle free and quickly surrenders. How can such a blue streak of adolescent nothing have such obscene strength?

\--

Terezi's method of greeting Dave is to leap into his arms from across the room. He is not expecting it, but his catch is casual and smooth, and his face remains without expression except for one raised blond eyebrow. Terezi's body is light in his arms, all shifting hips and elbows and warmer than a human in her drab gray jeans and black t-shirt. "My darling coolkid," she chirps, and flings both of her arms around his neck, "I was so lost without you."

"How the fuck did you know which one was me?" he asks her too-close face.

"You have the best butterscotch hair," she explains, and attempts to give his ear a lick. He sees that her tongue is kind of bluish, like she's been sucking on a popsicle. He remembers that she's supposed to have blue blood or something, like _literally_ blue, and he huffs one silent _hah_ of laughter at how ridiculous this whole thing is.

"Glad to hear it," he says, and leans away. "Nice grill."

Terezi grins so wide he can see the sickly overhead light shine off the tips of every single halloween pumpkin fang tooth, a langolier buzzsaw smile on the face of a grayscale elf-girl. "Thanks for noticing." Her breath puffs in his face hot and peppery and sweet.

He's finally met the girl who killed him and she is as every bit as much of a freak in real life. From her scuffed sneakers to her hilarious horns--which look like the kind you'd see in old Japanese drawings of demons--everything about her screams B-movie nerd-loon and he thinks that's pretty cool. Her hair is matte black and all dusty with cobwebs and clearly hasn't been combed in maybe forever, but it smells like some fruity shampoo and he thinks, _at least trolls have soap._ Behind her red glasses, cloudy glazed eyes peer with sightless curiousity beneath quirked eyebrows that promise mischief until the end of days. Which might be today, actually, but who the fuck is counting?

He figures she's okay. Bugfuck insane, yes, but pretty okay.

"Ride's over, my feral Valentine," Dave says, and places Terezi gently back on her feet. "If you're done giving me Jaws flashbacks, maybe you could introduce me to your friends so we can get this world-saving shit started?"

\--

Jade has been sobbing since just after they came through. She doesn't know why. Well, she knows _why_ but not how it overcame her so quickly, right now when she should finally be feeling a little bit safe, now that everything might be all right after all.

Kanaya and Rose have moved to her side and are trying to calm her down, but she's still sniffling between them.

She's scared of Jack Noir. Her dog died. She's never been in a room with so many people, and half of them are aliens, and all of them are talking at once. The world ended. She's been chatting with Horrorterrors in her sleep. Somehow it all comes together and what it comes to is _too fucking much_ , and she can't control it anymore, and it all comes flooding out. She's only thirteen. It isn't fair.

"I swear I'm not really like this," she whispers into red silk as glowing arms wrap around her. "I don't even know why I'm crying!"

"It's okay," Kanaya says, falling easily back into her role as the pacifying force of her social circle. Rose gives Jade's tangled hair an affectionate stroke.

"It's okay," Rose echoes, and feels no guilt at all for the lie.


	2. world serves its own needs listen to your heart bleed

> Be the awkward computer nerd again.

It takes a good three minutes for the volume level to go down enough to pick out strands of individual conversations. The formerly crying one's started nattering on about something to do with what she's wearing, and Kanaya is offering her tips on how to palette-match alchemized accessories. The one with the clipped precise voice-- _Rose, Terezi just called her Rose_ \--is asking everyone their trolltags and names in turn. She calls Karkat "Cancer" and he corrects her. "CarcinoGeneticist, right? You're the one who got our sweet little Jade calling everyone _fuckass_ ," she says, and you can't help a snort of amusement that isn't quite a laugh. Too late, you realize you have drawn attention to yourself.

"Gemini," someone says. Way too close. You jump a little. "You're twinArmageddons, right?" It's the formerly crying one. You look where you think she must be standing. "Yeah."

"I had a dream where I was talking to you," she says, and there's a long silence. You wonder what the hell is going on until she coughs, nervously.

"He doesn't see your hand, idiot," KK's voice, moving closer. "Sollux is blind."

"Oh fuck, I'm sorry, I forgot." Jade says. "Put out your hand, okay?"

So you do, and another hand reaches out of the black and clasps yours awkwardly. You realize she is trying to shake your hand, but you put out the wrong one, and at the wrong angle.

"Hi," you tell the hand you can't see, which is warm and soft and really small, and let go as quick as you can. You can smell sandalwood all around her, soft and dark and earthy.

"Weren't you with the red fairy girl in that dream bubble?"

"Aradia. Yeah."

"I like your goggles."

You notice all the trolls in the room have stopped talking for a moment. _Just_ for a moment, before they smooth over the silence with more babble amongst themselves. Nobody wants to talk about the goggles. You would tell them it was okay, that Feferi actually thinks they look cute on you, but they think you're creepy enough right now, and so you let it go.

"You're the green one," you say, uncomfortable. "Jade. The blue one's sister."

"Yeah. But that's not my blood color or anything, I just like it."

"Hey! Aren't you the hacker that hates us?" The other one that sounds a bit like Jade has joined you.

"Hand out again," Jade prompts. You put the correct one out this time, and there's a much stronger hand there now, shaking yours with enthusiasm. The person it belongs to smells like mint, or maybe it's the human version of toothpaste.

"I'm Sollux." You tell the minty void in front of you.

"I'm John. Oh man, hackers are the best." You can only boggle vacantly at where you guess his face must be. Is this guy fucking with you? "What's your game title?"

"I was the Mage of Doom." You let his hand go and wonder what you should do with your arms when you talk to a human. You decide to stuff them in your pockets and try to look casual.

"Sweet." he says. "What could you do?"

"Sit around moping and predicting everyone's death," KK answers for you.

"Accurately, in most cases," you point out, a little insulted. "And I solved a bunch of puzzles. Patched a huge glitch when we did LOFAF, if you remember. I coded that travel subroutine that got you over a missing map area without spending any grist on building--"

"--And then sat around on his ass moping and predicting everyone's death," KK concludes, cutting you off.

"Fuck you," you say, not wanting to argue in front of these strangers. He seems to sense that you're not into this and lets you go, which is yet another break from his usual tendencies. You wonder which of the humans has him on his best behavior.

You meet Rose next, and she's courteous but distant. She smells like lavender and something lighter, sort of powdery. Her fingers are short with long blunt nails and her grip is tentative. You wonder if she thinks you'll break. "Sorry to hear about your loss," she says as she shakes your hand.

"Uh." You aren't sure what to say to that. "Which loss?"

"Kanaya told me about... Pisces. Feferi?"

Oh. _That_ loss. You pocket your hand again and nod once, not saying anything because honestly the last thing you want to have right now is a feelings jam with an alien. "It's okay, I'm okay with it. She's fine."

"Really." Rose draws out the word a little, and you remember she's the meddler of their session, sort of like a grimdark Kanaya. God, having two of them on this rock is going to be a nightmare.

> Being blind is boring. Be someone who can see now.

You are now Dave Strider.

You and your friends have recently escaped your barren session and wound up in what looks like a 1950s horror movie Frankenstein lab on crack. The walls are dull and studded with rivets and rust stains, and the one directly to your left is smeared in spattery color splashes like a retarded kid got let loose with a step ladder and some truly hideous fingerpaints.

You noticed pretty much immediately that all four of these aliens have a twitchy sort of collective shellshock thing going on, so you figure it's probably _not_ paint. And that's pretty fucked up, but okay. From what you've heard talking to Terezi, these guys more or less go ax-crazy if they skip breakfast and that's supposed to be normal. If being multicultural means pretending you don't see a couple of freaked-out smiley faces dripping rusty brown-orange down the wall directly behind the skinny spooky one that's standing apart from the rest, then that's fine. You're the king of chill.

You wonder which of your new friends is the mystery artist, though.

There's a poke on the back of your neck, and you turn to find Terezi standing there with a white-tipped cane. She's jabbing you with it and looking expectant, and the taller one in the fancy gown is right behind her.

"Can I help you?" you ask, and push the cane aside with the back of one hand.

"You guys eat regular food, right?" Terezi asks, and waves the cane around to the beat of her words. "Meat and vegetables and things that aren't in little boxes with freakishly vivid cartoon faces on them?"

"If we have to," you tell her.

The fancy one steps a little closer. "I'm Kanaya. I thought it might be nice if I cooked something, now that we're all in one place. Would you and your teammates care to join us for a meal somewhere a little less..." her black lips flatten in a considering line as she eyes the spattered walls.

"Troll Jackson Pollock?" you suggest.

"I'm sorry, who?"

You cock a thumb at a vertical smear of navy blue that could almost be a handprint, and her expression hardens. She shuts her eyes for a moment, and you notice that even when they're closed, her eyes are still sort of glowy-yellow through the lids. "Yes. I suppose you'd like me to explain what happened..."

"One of you went bugfuck and discovered a passion for interior design."

Terezi busts out with a laugh that sounds like an 80 year old redneck strangling on a smoker's cough. The pure alien glee of her response sets your teeth on edge and brings prickly vibes to the little hairs on your neck. "Best summary of our weekend _ever_. Come on, Strider, let me give you the grand tour of Troll Paradise."

John and the shithead with the round horns and a crow's nest of hair have stopped snarling and giggling at each other like a couple of cats in heat and are now talking Serious Leader shit (which somehow involves a DVD exchange program, and let's face it you don't really want to know the connection). Jade and Rose are all over the wallflower with the stupid swim goggles and the extra set of horns. Wallflower troll is squirming visibly beneath the combined onslaught of enthusiastic home-school nerd-cheer and whatever the fuck Rose calls her way of trying to convince the world she's forty years old and the master of all civilized discourse.

 _Been there, done that,_ you think, and let the blind lunatic who is probably not a mad fingerpainter show you out of the frankenstein lab and into the horror movie hallway.


	3. feeling pretty psyched

The food isn't great, just some canned soup and salad consisting of piles of limp raw vegetables with a vaguely chemical flavor. But Rose Lalonde recognizes carrots and celery among the pile of wilted greens in the center of the table, and food is food. Everything they're eating, Terezi informs her through a bear trap mouth full of not-quite-broccoli, has been alchemized from Alternian gardens via a rather inventive chain of trans-timeline captchaloguing code shenanigans.

They are eating the coded ghosts of their dead civilization while Karkat and John discuss the differences between each universe's iteration of Will Smith. And she watches them, curious to see what child soldiers from two very different planets look like when there's nothing to do but wait for their next battle.

Karkat is a little jumpy, but he puts visible effort into swaggering along like it's nothing. Kanaya and Terezi have this habit of checking him before making statements related to their session, and it's obvious what they're doing, making sure their leader is on the same page. Rose is impressed despite herself. She would have pegged this boy as a cartoon Napoleon from his chatlogs with John, a ranting wannabe tyrant who resorts to caps lock because even he doesn't think he's worth listening to.

Clearly she misjudged Vantas.

Terezi is flirting with all of the humans. At first this bothers Rose, though she feels certain she was successful in concealing her unease, but she's beginning to realize that's just how the teal-blooded Libra _is_ , a hyperactive and very extroverted young lady who may or may not have been raised by wolves. She acts out, Rose thinks, making a show of the childishness that keeps reality from becoming too real, and has no interest whatsoever in what Rose considers to be basic social graces. She sniffs everything, licks anything red. She thinks it's funny when John squeaks out a panicked plea for mercy at her invasion of his personal bubble, and her laugh is too loud and too hearty.

Somewhere under that gaiety, Rose figures, there's a little kid who understands jack shit. How did she make it so far in the game? (She will get her answer in the upcoming battle, when she sees Terezi fight for the first time, a one-girl dervish smearing berserker fury across the battlefield.)

Kanaya is the one Rose knows best. The way she latched onto Jade during her outburst on arrival, soothing and then cheering her with gentle conversation. Since then she has been mostly polite and silent. She clearly needs someone to take care of. A bit codependent, Rose thinks, but maybe that's normal for Troll relationships. She's torn between fascination with the poise and stillness of Maryam, especially contrasted to the frenetic energy of her surviving Troll girl counterpart, and a certain dread whenever she thinks of the last strained conversation between them, right before Rose gave herself to the Outer Gods.

Then there's Sollux Captor, trying to sit by himself and ignore everybody. She sort of wants to dissect this one over a space of several days, but Captor has made it abundantly clear that he has no interest in mixing with the human guests. Rose knows only the basics: that he's the one who coded the Troll version of the game they've all played, that he was close to the one called Feferi, who is now dead, that he alone among his allies never trolled any of the kids.

She's pretty sure he's close to Karkat, but it's hard to tell if they're friends or bitter enemies enforcing a truce as the last two males of their species. More troll ambiguity to look into later, perhaps? She has heard that they consider friendship and enmity to be synonyms, after all. For the hundredth time today, Rose reflects on how grateful she is to have been born a human.

Rose observes the way the Gemini stumbles along one battered steel wall, brows tight with concentration, counting his steps toward the then-empty table, rather than taking a seat with the others. She notices that he sits with his back to the wall and spills the soup until Terezi goes to help him (and she notices the annoyed face he makes when he accepts the aid of another blind person). So he hasn't been blind long. The others sort of tiptoe around him. She doesn't think they're scared of him, precisely.

She makes a mental note to follow this up later. Perhaps Kanaya, with her love of meddling, will answer some of these questions. For now, Rose selects a tiny yellow cherry tomato and crushes it with her flat human molars. Her mouth fills with the acid-sweet flavors of alchemy and lost worlds, and she wonders if it even matters. Are any of them going to be alive in a week's time?

\--

John Egbert refuses to shut the fuck up even when he's eating. Karkat can only stare, horrified, as this beige-and-blue tornado waxes pornographic about some hideous thing called reality television. He's basically given up trying to keep track at this point and has surrendered to the waves of nonsense that keep rushing and rushing outward from John's ludicrously bucktoothed windhole. At some point it stops being words and Karkat begins to enjoy a certain pleasant detachment, thinking _this is what a human sounds like when his brain is turned off._ Hearing John babble on and on about eating eyeballs and live bugs and snails for money--and seriously, what the fuck kind of irrational crap entertainment is _that_ \--Karkat can finally believe for the first time that he is sucking down shitty soup and plastic-tasting salad greens with real live _aliens._

The assault of verbiage finally slams to a halt when Jade beans John on the back of the head with a piece of cauliflower. "Hey asshole," she calls from the other table, "Some of us are trying to eat here."

\--

Dave's in no mood to socialize, but there are only so many tables in this room. He ignores Terezi's beckoning gesture and cries of mocking invitation to sit with the five loudest assholes in paradox space and takes his seat next to Jade at the almost-empty second table. The skinny nerdy one with the swim goggles is now directly across from him, regarding the room with a pretty decent poker face and not touching his steaming mug of soup.

"Hey, Dave!" Jade looks tired as hell, but she's at least smiling. "You haven't met Sollux yet, have you?" At this, Sollux turns to almost-but-not-quite face Dave.

"Nah," Dave says, "too busy getting facelicked by my new alien suckmonster fiancee."

"You get used to her," Sollux says. "She's pretty cool, for a walking tongue."

Dave doesn't bother with the handshake thing, it's the end of the world and who gives a shit about bullshit rituals? This guy didn't seem too keen on the idea earlier when he was meeting the other three humans, anyway. Dave settles on his go-to greeting: "Sup?"

Sollux shrugs. "Death and destruction. Shitty food I can't chew." He considers for a moment before cracking a truly ghastly smile. "Could be worse."

Dave nods, appreciating this. "What the fuck happened to your teeth, dude," he finally asks, and Jade sputters. _"DAVE!"_

"It's okay, I don't care. That guy--" A vague wave toward the sound of Karkat's sneering voice mocking something dumb John just said, "--dumped me down a flight of stairs or something. Supposedly they'll grow back in like a sweep or two, but I'll be dead by then so whatever."

"Too bad you didn't join the trolling," Dave tells him, ignoring that last statement because doom is pretty much boring. "I could have warned you--"

Sollux performs a pretty decent double facepalm. "Fucking goddamn it," he tells his hands, "I walked into that. Terezi, come get your pet meme generator."

"What's this, what's this?" Terezi caws, descending in a flurry. "Is the big bad coolkid bothering my blind bro?" She wraps her arms around Dave's neck from behind. "Be nice to him, bulgebreath, he's in mourning."

"TZ, goddamn it--" Sollux frowns.

"He had the most delicious two-tone gimmick," she continues, releasing Dave to sit beside him, "But now he tastes of boring and mustard. It's all very tragic." She snaps the end off a carrot stick to punctuate her statement, then puts the half-eaten remains back in the serving dish. Jade fishes it out with two fingers and an expression of baffled amusement, and lays it to rest on the table surface.

"Yeah, thanks for the exposition," Sollux says, sounding tired and distracted, and attempts to leave the table without stumbling or bumping into anything. He finds the wall with one long bony hand and follows it haltingly, moving more or less in the general direction of the hallway beyond.

"The denial phase is the worst." Terezi stage-whispers to the two humans remaining in her immediate reach, and moves to drape herself across Jade like a large insane house cat. "Wow, your hair is _long."_


	4. slash and burn

"I am so sorry," Kanaya says for the third time. "I had intended to serve you something a little more appetizing as a gesture of interspecies welcome, but I have had very little experience in food preparation." She apologizes the same way she does everything else, with dignity and precision. Rose can't help but watch the way the troll girl's shining ski-slope nose scrunches, no doubt at the memory of her disastrous attempt to cook a roast.

"I keep telling you it's quite all right," Rose reassures her. "Two hours ago I was staring down the metaphorical barrel, fully expecting to join the rest of my species in oblivion. A meal of hot soup and garden greens with friends strikes me as a perfectly acceptable outcome, under the circumstances." She stacks her empty mug atop her plate and slides it to the center of the table. John gathers up the leftovers and Terezi directs him to the kitchen, her grin now studded with bits of broccoli as she tears into yet another helping of salad.

Jade and Dave have managed to drive Sollux away from the table somehow, and he's halfway to the door with a look of pure annoyance on his face. She wonders how he will take Dave's impromptu rapping seizures, and vows to bunk the two of them together tonight. She won't exactly bathe in the schadenfreude, but she must admit it would be interesting to see which of them cracks first.

"But still, I do apologize" Kanaya continues, and gives the corners of her mouth a few fretful little dabs with her napkin. "I feel terrible about the mess in the kitchen. Perhaps I should have followed a recipe." She frowns down at the black lipstick prints she has left on the linen, then places the napkin back on the table with a grim little ghost of a smile. "Or perhaps made a habit of keeping a fire extinguishing device close at hand."

"We can alchemize another saucepan, Kanaya," Rose sighs. "And I never liked that shirt anyway."

\--

The trouble begins when John finds the horn in the thermal hull.

He's leaning way into the hull, face-deep in a could of chilly air that smells strongly of spoiling food. The smell mingles unpleasanty with the lingering odor of singed hair in the kitchen, a legacy of an earlier nightmare-roast experiment. He's not really sure what happened, since he was busy hanging out with Karkat, but Terezi keeps dropping little hints that the survival of the troll race might depend on never letting Kanaya cook again.

His attempts to fit the pot of cooling soup on the only shelf with any space left have met with no success. Giving up on the brute force approach, he puts the pot on the floor and excavates a little cave from a mound of poorly wrapped, half-eaten food items. He finds baggies of fish sticks, whole fruits like nothing he's seen on Earth going black and squishy and moldy in a plastic bin, several large slices of leathery pizza, and more farty-smelling packages of bloody raw meat than he wants to think about. The obviously poisonous stuff goes on the floor to be thrown away later. At last he unearths a stinking soft melon of some kind, sloshing bruised and slimy in a plastic bowl. When he holds his breath and removes this, there's finally enough room for the soup, except...

Behind the bowl is a bike horn, the old-fashioned kind with a huge black bulb, half buried under a packet of shredded cheese. Just sort of sitting there being comical amid the culinary wreckage.

What it's doing in there will forever remain a mystery, but John is gripped by a strong desire to play with it immediately. He removes the horn, stows the soup in the open space he's created, and chucks the armload of rotten crap in the trash can (or possibly he should be calling it a Waste Item Receptacle in this universe?) before bringing the horn into the cafeteria to show everyone.

"Hey, Karkat! Look what I found in the fridge!" he says, and squeezes the cold black rubber bulb.

HONK.

\--

Everyone freezes. The horn is _loud_ , way louder than John had expected, and the riveted steel walls do nothing whatsoever to dampen the echoes. Jade and Rose both startle and whip around to look at John. Dave has turned as well, but he looks as cool as ever. The four trolls (Sollux is nearly to the hallway, mid-flight from the combined irritation of Terezi and the Dave human) are frozen in almost comical unison. Terezi's mouth opens in an O of surprise.

 _oh crap,_ John thinks, _I'm being annoying again._

"John, do you _mind?"_ Jade snaps, breaking the silence.

Karkat, sitting half-turned toward the sound of John's voice, is still frozen. Well, except his shoulders, which are suddenly shaking really hard. Kanaya reaches across the table toward him with one slender arm, says his name in that soothing way she has, but she never makes contact and he isn't listening. For one long horrible second John can see nothing in that oddly humanish gray face but a sort of completely alarming blank animal stupidity, and then he's up from the table in a gray and black blur, and John recognizes that's _panic _in his new friend's eyes, fucking _panic_ , and before John can process this or ask himself what even just happened, Karkat is gone, turning on his heels to flee from the room. He knocks Sollux into the doorway in his rush to be somewhere far away from here.__

He doesn't know exactly what it all means, but he gets that he has made a stupid mistake.

\--

Sollux recovers from being knocked back against the wall and begins to pick his way back to the dining area, fumbling for the edge of a table and following it with one hand toward where John stands, speechless with the suddenly-not-even-slightly-hilarious horn still dangling from one hand, with the entire room staring at him.

"John?" Sollux asks, and when John says "Um..." the Mage of Doom gets a bead on his voice and takes a swing.

He must be getting pretty good at this whole blind thing, because his fist catches something warm and bony and the impact--PAK!--sends an icy flaming jolt up his entire arm. He hears a surprised _haff_ of the human's minty-smelling breath as it explodes outward, and then there's the sound of a body hitting the floor somewhere at his feet and nobody says a _word._

\--

> Be suddenly less 0kay with everything.

Right. Okay. You're Sollux again, and Karkat has just knocked you into a wall, where your still-bruised shoulder and the back of your over-abused skull got yet another working over, because God knows you aren't in enough pain right now as it is.

You can tell it's KK by the sound of his footsteps, the smell of his sweat and also because who the fuck _else_ would it be running out of the room making that noise in his throat right now? _Fuck._

Your ears are still smarting from the sound of Gamzee's horn. How did John even get ahold of that thing? Terezi and Kanaya went on a rampage two days ago to get rid of them, all of them, and there ended up being a lot. The pile in the computer lab came up to your hips by the time it was done, smelling like copper and death and old crumbling rubber. You launched that shit into space and imagined the sight of all those old memories gone to shit and spinning out into space and you thought that was it, that it was over, but of course nothing is _ever_ over in this place. There's always another place to hide your stupid clown bullshit. There's always another way to get fucked.

John found the horn, and like the stupid monkey he was, decided it would be a really great idea to go around scaring the shit out of people with it. That's the thing to focus on here.

And so you pop him one. You do it for KK, who you already understand will not thank you for it, but this isn't about what he wants, really. It's about how nobody should make a noise like that, ever. Nobody should be strangling back sobs like that without somebody having to pay _right the fuck up,_ and Terezi and Kanaya might not get it but you fucking _do,_ and so yeah you fucking _hit him_ and _good_ and you hope you broke his goddamn nose.

And then he doesn't get up from the void at your feet, but just sort of sits there on the floor making baffled apologetic noises about how he never meant any harm, and you hear sniffling in the dead shocked silence and he's crying and asking "What did I _do?"_ and just like that you run all out of rage. You know everyone's looking at you, but fuck it. Fuck the spectacle you're making of yourself, you're done with this shit. You find the wall with your stinging hand, and follow KK out of the room at as much of a hurry as you can manage. Nobody even tries to stop you, which is good because you still have a hand and you're feeling pretty good about your aim just about now.

It's not going to be a hard search. You've done this dance a couple times since it happened, but at least _this_ time you had someone to hit first. You're pretty sure your knuckles are bleeding, though.


	5. return

"Tilt your head back." Rose says, and John complies. His nose feels kind of like a squashed tomato. An extra chilly squashed tomato, now that there's an ice cube wadded up in the orange-pink soggy bloody tissues currently pressed against one very sore nostril. It's kind of gross because now he's got blood running down his throat and he keeps having to swallow it. _Bluh, I'm a vampire._

"No, you're supposed to tilt it _forward._ Jade corrects. "Blood makes you borf, I read it on the internet. Also, you should pinch the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It's a pressure point."

"I'b fide," John tells her. "Id's just a dosebleed."

"Well, the good news is that it isn't broken," Rose tells him. "But you've got a chipped incisor."

John runs his tongue across his front teeth and feels the new landscape there. It's weird how one little change makes his whole mouth feel unfamiliar all of a sudden. "Oh," he says. "Am I going to lose it?"

"No, it's just a little piece of enamel. If I may be blunt and delve briefly into the realm of the lookist, you do have enough to spare."

"Yeah, that's be," John sighs, miserable. "Aw _ban."_

"Listen, I'm nothing if not the sassy-pants king of interspecies disability sensitivity, but if you want me to go beat up a blind alien kid, say the word."

"Dave--" John begins.

"No, really. I'll be your after-school special playground bully."

"Id's fide, Dave. Led id go."

Dave shrugs. "Consider it wild and free in the great outdoors. So now what?" He's sitting on the food prep table across from the sink, where Rose has John sitting on the counter like an oversized kindergartner with his comically yellow shoes dangling down. There's a scatter of tiny red droplets on the shoes, and more on the front of his shirt. Rose pulls away the tissue, presses a clean side to his nose, and pulls it away. There's only a tiny spot of red this time. "I think you're fine now," she says, and chucks the soggy tissue with its ice cube center straight into the trash.

"Wow, Lalonde. Nothing but net."

"I try," she shrugs. "Okay, John, go clean off your face. But don't blow your nose for at least the rest of today, or it's going to start up again."

"I feel like shit," John tells his bloody shoes. He isn't ready to leave the counter quite yet.

"I can look for some aspirin if you--"

"No, no. That's fine. I just. I didn't think, that's all. I thought it would be funny. Is it weird that I kinda want to punch me too?"

"Yes, John. That is a little bit weird."  
\--

Kanaya pokes her head through the doorway. She and Terezi have been sitting in the cafeteria while the humans do their weird polyamorous moirail thing in the kitchen. She did go in once, ten minutes ago, but only long enough to give the humans a very abridged version of the Gamzee incident. (Terezi is still out there, Dave thinks, probably resisting the lure of all that candy red blood for the sake of not horrifying the guests. Kanaya may be the thirst-crazy vampire here, but Terezi's the one to watch out for.)

She deliberately left out a few of the more gruesome details, but as far as Kanaya is concerned, there are certain things you just don't dust off and present to company on their first day in your universe. Especially not when 20% of your species has just sucker-punched 25% of theirs for no apparent reason.

"May I enter?" she asks, averting her eyes from John's slaughterhouse floor of a face to be polite.

"Of course. It's you guys's kitchen," John says. He's got a wet napkin and is using it to scrub flecks of dried blood from around his nostrils.

"How do you feel?"

"Better than Karkat, probably," John mutters, and there's some real bitterness there. "I should have figured no good would come of clown horns in the fridge."

"You didn't know any better, and you didn't deserve to be hit for it." Kanaya crosses her arms and leans against the counter, regarding him with that mellow orange stare. "If it helps, I don't think Karkat will hold a grudge. He thinks the world of you, even if he won't admit it."

"But that's the thing, I _did_ know better. He told me about your clown dude going crazy. He even said something about honking. I just didn't _think."_

"Calm down. You're the one with the smooshed nose." Jade hoists herself onto the counter at John's side and pets him on the head like a dog. "And just because you freaked Karkat out doesn't mean Assface gets to go around punching people."

"I still think I should go find Karkat and apologize."

"That would be a bad idea right now." Kanaya's voice is firm. "I am so very sorry, John. You are not seeing my teammates and myself at our best. We do try, but we are having some problems adjusting to various pressures."

"Kanaya, seriously--" John begins.

"I will be speaking to Sollux later," she continues. "For now, it's best if we leave the two of them alone for a while."

Dave snorts. "There are so many hilarious things I could be saying in response to that." Dave glances at John, all red face and swollen nose, and the sight of those too-shiny blue eyes reassures him. Yeah, he and Mr. Sensitivity are going to end up having words of their own, but there isn't much sense in bringing it up again now just when John is finally feeling better.

Kanaya turns to face him, all perfect posture and manners. "Dave Strider. I do not wish to seem inhospitable to a guest, but I think perhaps this is one of those situations where it might avoid future conflict. In that spirit, I have something I need to say to you."

"Okay," Dave tells her, deadpan as always. "I promise not to act all flustered. I mean, I knew Prom was coming up and you've been ogling me something fierce during homeroom, but I gotta tell you, I'm kinda already going with someone else."

"I'm... sorry?" Kanaya practically winces.

"Ignore him. He babbles." Rose huffs from the sink. She's trying to wash the little lines of dried blood out of the palms of her hands without any soap, and makes a mental note to alchemize some before everyone dies of Troll MRSA.

"You... are sitting where we prepare our meals." Kanaya finally says, and frowns. "With your human posterior region."

He feels like there was something else she wanted to say, but changed her mind at the last second. Whatever, not his problem. Dave slides obligingly from the table with a muted thud of sneakers on steel. "You're just jealous that my sweet pink cheeks are hands-down the finest thing in this kitchen, even after you spent three hours torturing that poor innocent chunk of steak and getting all sweaty and bothered."

John giggles. "Dude, _gross."_

Dave strolls from the room without looking back. "Let he whose ass is not perched on a normally sanitary kitchen surface throw the first stone of gluteal derision, Egderp. You want this fine and perky bubble for your big gay breakfast and everyone here knows it. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go powder my nose so I'll be pretty for our date."

"Worst imagery ever," John calls after him over the sound of Jade giggling. He sounds back to his usual bright and cheery self. Dave's jaw unclenches, but only a little.


	6. listen to yourself churn

>Be Dave.

You figure this place must be huge to need so many transportalizer pads, but _fuck _. The hallways just go on and fucking _on_. And the fluorescents eternally striping down the center of the ceilings all flicker and hum and buzz like wasps, fucking up your internal beat with grinding alien monotony.__

If there's anything that pisses you off, really genuinely gets the fuck under your skin, it's a beat that won't settle the fuck down.

Growing up in Bro's apartment, there was always music. He'd mix all night and it would get in your head, crazy dancing jiving whirling dreams that you could never remember on waking, except as a hazy blur of motion and intensity. You woke up to the Overlords, took your morning piss to Eon and Depeche Mode and Recoil. People always pegged Bro as a rapper, and shit, he _was_ , he was the fucking best--but what he secretly liked to play when it was just the two of you and four walls was Kraftwerk and Brian Eno.

"Know thy roots, little brother," he'd say, and slide a vinyl MI-Sex record out of its crumpled tissue sleeve. "You're listening to the grade school of cool." He'd turn up the volume and point out samples you've heard a thousand times in other newer songs. "These guys fuckin' laid down the basics. You hear that shit?"

And you did hear it.

You ate your cereal nodding your head with the rhythm. Walked to school to the beat. Your school banned headphones, but that only meant keeping it going in your head instead of your ears, thumping and rolling and drawing you through the hours like the coolest schizo voices anyone ever heard. You'd get home still grooving and he'd be gone, he was always gone, but he'd leave the sound system going and more often than not the drums in your head and the drums in your apartment still held the same fucking beat after all those hours, and if you put your fingers to your throat and checked your pulse that shit would be in time too.

Bro had a wall rack of keyboards and rubber-topped hexagon drum machines and mysterious mixing panels covered in dials and switches and shit. You never touched them back then and you always wondered what they were for. Bro used an ancient Atari computer for the MIDI samples because he liked it. He sold weed for instrument money and swapped out equipment he got tired of every year or so.

Then one day he brought home an antique KORG synth he got off some shitty broken-up ska fusion band cheap and, yeah, it was DOA, but you only had to crack the wooden casing open and dust out the bug shit and reconnect one wire and it fired right up. He let you do it all by yourself while he watched and showed you which way to turn the screwdriver.

That was the day he clapped you on the back and shoved his giant mixing headphones at you, stretching the loopy phone-cord all the way to the plug, tethering you to the beat. The hiss of the live connection, then the clamor of the keyboards, and it was like the ocean rushing at you, shhhhh shhhhh shhhhh BOOM in your ears, and you wore those cans with a feeling like God himself was thumping on your skull from the inside and that was the day you finally _understood_ music.

Life is the beat. That's how you know the world makes sense.

First he showed you how to select instruments on the keyboard, let you fuck around picking out three blind mice in barnyard animal noises and car horns. Yeah it was kiddy shit but Bro never said a word, and after you were done being a complete spaz of a seven year old he pushed you aside and played a toccata with the phones unplugged to limber up his fingers and get to the serious business of filling your world up with scratch mixes and hip hop and all the other shit he did for a living at the club.

You don't know if anyone else ever heard Bro lay down the Bach with his shades hiding his closed eyes, poker-faced in a whole different way from what the club girls and boys ever saw probably even in bed, standing ten feet and a genre away from his beat-to-shit holy turntables, with the fucking crows at the window like the front row of a concert hall. You suspect those birds and yourself were the only audience he ever pulled out the classics for. And now the birds are dead, Bro's dead, and you're the last one who remembers it. You never got the classics in your blood. Just the beat, and the knowledge that you've got to keep it going now. The crusty old masters, the New Wave he fed you every day, the rap. Ready or not, it's all yours now.

It's your inheritance, this echoing ghost of a rhythm going tn-tn-tn-tsch in your head. Who even knows if that's enough to do it all justice. You could write a list of all the shit that doesn't exist anymore, but fuck that. It would all just come down to _tn-tn-tn-tsch_ and some crazy spine-shivery pizzicato string shit laid on top, maybe some theremin in honor of the thoroughly vintage sci fi decor and the fact that this is the very day the Earth actually stood the fuck still.

You could make a hell of an apocalypse mix using your headmusic as the backbeat, and no one but you would ever know what you were telling them until you threw a vocal track down on top, because you had Bro to teach you what the fuck music even _was_ and these poor fuckers didn't.

Bzzt. Bzzzzzt. Bzt.

You're Dave Strider and you intend to keep that beat going until this universe ends like your old one just did and everything goes back to the start. Which is cool. That's how it goes with a record. You play one side, flip it, play the other. Same songs every time, but you can listen to the hiss-pop-hiss of trapped dust in the cracks between the songs and that sound is never the same twice. Or you can scratch it up, fuck up the record so it won't play right and the needle's trashed and maybe it'll finally sound like a whole new _song._

Somewhere in there you were going for a metaphor, but this overhead lighting and its stupid meaningless noise is screwing with your head a little bit. It's got you thinking about shit you don't have time for. And seriously fuck introspection, that's not who you are.

So these past five minutes? They didn't just happen.

\--

"Have a good walk?" Terezi asks Dave when he gets back. He inclines his head, _meh_ , and sits back down at the table. "Never did find that bathroom."

"The load gaper is right through there," she says, pointing down the other end of the hall. He glances where she's indicating and there it is, a sealed bulkhead door mostly hidden in the shadows of a dead section of lighting. "You should have asked me first, coolkid."

"Welp," he says, shrugging. "I sure hope that wasn't _your_ bedroom I just pissed in, then."

She just grins.

"Where's everyone else?"

"Rose and Kanaya are working out sleeping arrangments. Jade is sleeping in my block already, and John went for a walk by himself a few minutes ago."

"So it's just you and me, then," he says, and leans way too close.

"Yeah." she says, and closes the remaining distance. For a moment, they're nose-to-nose, the pale human with his light dusting of freckles and the gray girl with the langolier teeth, so close their sunglasses are nearly touching.

She licks the tip of his nose, snake-quick, and is up and out the door cackling like a hyena before Dave can even begin to flashtep out of the danger zone. He grabs the lone (and very cold by now) remaining mug of soup from the table with every intention of chasing her down and dumping it on her head.


	7. book burning

You are now John Egbert and of _course_ you didn’t just decide to go for a stroll down a bunch of super-creepy space station hallways for the fun of it, and of _course_ nobody really believed you when you said you _were_ , but you’re pretty grateful for the pretense.

You have a sore nose but it’s more or less stopped aching except when you poke at it. Which you keep doing, because it’s _there_. You have a chipped tooth you can’t stop groping with the tip of your tongue and it’s starting to sting because of the sharp edge. You have blood on your shoes and a heavy heart in your chest. And you have a Plan.

It’s kind of odd how many of the things you currently have involve prodding something sore against your better judgment.

Nevertheless you are on a mission, armed to the teeth with a secret stash of gummy worms hidden way down deep in your sylladex behind a pile of smelly laundry and some ASSORTED LITERATURE that no one can ever, ever know about (especially not Rose). The last gummy worms in two universes are your emergency candy, to be opened only in the event of mass extinction events, loss of virginity celebration, or accidentally sending your new alien best friend into a panic attack by being a complete five alarm flaming sriracha _douche_.

Which isn’t exactly how Rose phrased it, but you figure you more or less have the jist. Kanaya advised you to let it go as _One Of Those Things That Sometimes Happens When Culture Clashes Occur Together With Unfortunate Events Like The End Of The Universe_ , but she’s sort of like Rose in a lot of ways, one of which is that she maybe doesn’t get the gnawing panic of brofail. Or the way needing to set things right can drive you batshit even if it is the wrong time to make your grand gesture of reparations.

She’s probably right, but you’re still looking for Karkat instead of letting him come find you.

There is a long murky streak of purple running shoulder-high along the wall on your left. Nothing is painted or written in it this time, it’s just just a wide horizontal stripe that turns into drippy spatters and long flat lines where purple ran all the way to the floor and pooled in the corner. It goes on and on down the hall. So that’s what troll blood really looks like? Like paint? It’s like some kind of censored video game where they figure you’re old enough to pretend to beat a guy to death for fun but oh no, not _red_ blood, that’s way too violent.

Since you know everyone’s color here except for Karkat’s, and none of them are purple, you figure you’re looking at a visual record of somebody’s last moments. This sort of creeps you out to be alone with this grim display, but Kanaya assured you (while fondling a tube of lipstick but never actually applying any) that the assorted killers of the Troll group have all been “accounted for” and it’s perfectly safe to walk around alone now, provided you don’t go insane and start killing people yourself.

Which seems to be a risk when you’re a troll.

But “accounted for.” That’s kind of a fucked up way of putting it, but then again she drinks people’s blood and glows in the dark. Cultural sensitivity, John.

The blood-smear terminates without any dramatic display just before the hallway bends, and when you come around the corner you see them sitting on the floor about twenty feet away, in front of another sealed metal door with one of those huge wheel lock thingies to open it.

You can’t see their faces but their weird gray alien arms are wrapped around each other like they’re trying to crush each other to death in slow motion. You can tell it’s Karkat and Sollux because of their horns, but the rest is a gray-black blur under the flickering lights.

Voices break the buzzing silence.

 __

“..what to fucking do...”  
“...I know, but it’s not like you don’t...”  
“...did everything wrong...”  
“...bullshit, man, that’s...”  
“...tired of jumping every time...”  
“...gets better, KN says...”  
“...have time to get fucking better, dumbfuck, I want...”  
“...different having _you_ be the one freaking...”  
“...my bulge, you insensitive...”

Well shit. You hadn’t planned on interrupting anything with your grand gesture.

You’ll come back later, you figure, but your stupid shoes scuff the floor as you stop in your tracks and that’s when Sollux looks up from the mass of black on black that is Karkat’s hair and shoulder and sees you. Well okay, he doesn’t see you, but the jig is still up.

“Sorry,” you say, caught red-handed and just like that they break apart from their too-needy alien death grip hug, and now Karkat glares at you with bleary pink-edged eyes and snot all down his upper lip as he stumbles to his feet. Sollux stays sitting on the floor, looking as passive and unemotional as he did when you arrived out of nowhere. The same expression as when he punched you out, now that you think about it.

Dave and this guy, you think with wild and detached panic, need to have a stoic-off.

“The fuck do you want, human.” Karkat barks, and his voice cracks. He wipes his cheeks and nose on the back of a long sleeve (gross, man) and you just do not even begin to know what to say to him right now.

“Uhhhh.” you manage, eventually. “Hi. Um.”

“Unbelievable.” Karkat spits. “Tavros Nitram fucking rides again.” Sollux snorts at this, and finally rises to his feet.

“I came to apologize?” you squeak. “For being a stupid Earth human?”

A long, long silence.

“No apologizing will ever be enough,” Karkat finally sighs. “You were fucking hatched sorry, Egbert.”

“But I didn’t mean to interrupt--”

“You know what, I’m going to go find something to do that isn’t being here,” Sollux says, and gives Karkat a clumsy whack on the back that you figure was probably a reassuring shoulder-punch gone wrong. Karkat grunts from the impact, but says nothing as Sollux passes him and approaches you. Squashing your nose must have been a hell of a lucky shot with aim like that.

“Hey, Sollux. I just wanted to tell you I’m not mad about you decking me,” you tell Sollux. He stiffens, then nods, and you swear you see something like guilt pass over his face for a moment before he’s all blank black stare and bizarre swimming goggles again. “It was a bad moment for everyone, and no harm was done, so--”

“Wait, what the fuck, Sollux? You _hit_ him?” Karkat asks Sollux.

“Kind of,” he replies, uneasily. “Just once, though. After you left.”

“Why the fuck did you punch Egbert?”

“The question is, why doesn’t _everyone_ punch Egbert?” Sollux snickers, but there’s no bite in it. You wonder if this is the way alien coolkids apologize for things.

 _Karkat gives him a completely wasted filthy look. “I cannot believe you, Captor. ‘ _Oh look at me, I’m thooooo enlightened and okay with everything that I don’t give a shit about anything anymore exthept beating up harmlethh thmall animalth and mentally handicapped wrigglerth the minute KK’th back ith turned.’_ ”_

“Oh my god you complete moron. Okay, first of all I _never_ sounded like that--”

“You guys--” you try to cut in, but it’s not going to happen.

“You’re right, thorry. Too many big wordth.” Karkat snaps with a kind of contemptuous glee.

“Wait. Seriously? You want to go down the intelligence putdown route? The guy who couldn’t set his own alarm clock without blowing it up?”

“Oh fuck you, Captor.”

“Eat me raw, Vantas.”

You watch in horror as Sollux walks past you, going back in the general direction of the cafeteria. He stops only once, to glance blindly back at you. “Sorry I hit you," he says, and visibly considers saying more. He changes his mind, shakes his head and leaves, following a mangled right hand along the wall. Hey, looks like your face fought back. Also, yellow-blooded people's scabs look _weird._

Now it’s just you and Karkat. Karkat, who is sneering over your shoulder at the other departed troll. Did you just do something hideous and permanent to their relationship on top of everything else you messed up today?

“That guy,” Karkat grumbles. “is fucking unbelievable.”

Silence.

God, you suck. You are the worst apologizer ever.

More silence. All right, that’s it, you just can’t stand it anymore.

“Want a gummy worm?” you ask, timidly.

“Fuck’s a gummy worm?” Karkat snarls, finally looking at you again. It’s incredibly unnerving the way his eyes pick up the sickly light from the overhead fluorescents when he finally stops for breath and looks at you again, but he looks a whole lot better than the last time you were eye to eye.

“It’s candy. Shaped like worms.”

“That is the most retarded thing I have ever--no, wait, any conversation with Captor holds that honor, may he drown forever in a puddle of his own discharge. But still.”

“Um, listen. Are you guys... not friends anymore?” you ask. This is not how it went in your head, this is not your grand friendleader gesture that fixes everything, this is not--

And oh shit now his shoulders are shaking again and you’ve really gone and done it this time.

No, wait. He’s...laughing?

He’s laughing.

Well, sort of. You guess. You have never seen someone laugh while scowling before, but with Karkat it sort of makes sense.

“Uh, what...?”

“Private joke, asshole.” He waves you off. “Never mind.”

“Okay.” You bite your lip and _ow_ , that sharp edge again. You remind yourself for the tenth time to be more careful. “Should I maybe leave you alone?”

“No, you should sit your freaky pink ass down and show me this ridiculous nematode-themed candy before I change my mind.”

 ****


	8. blood letting

** > Be the girl who isn’t actually a crybaby.**

You are Jade Harley, and you really _aren’t_. Right, well, today you kind of are, but as your friends keep reminding you over and over, it’s no big deal and you shouldn't feel like such a sissy, but you do.

You have been offered more shoulders to snot up tonight than you know what to do with, and you’re kind of tired of emotion in general at the moment. Your head feels like a shirt on a laundry line, all wrung out and damp and heavy and limp. The first thing you do when you’re finished making sure your ecto-brother isn’t about to die of nasal blood loss is ask Kanaya to show you where you’ll be sleeping that night. Or morning. Without a sun it’s sort of a pointless distinction either way. You yawn halfway through the question.

“Oh, dear.” she says, “You’re dead on your feet.” _Says the vampire,_ you think, and then decide not to say anything in case she’s sensitive about it or something. “Let me see. I assume your human gender taboos mean you’d rather not sleep in the same respiteblock as a male in case your various parts end up interlocking in your sleep.”

“That’s one way of putting it, but _ew."_ You frown. “It’s more about seeing each other in our underwear and laughing ourselves to death.”

“Ah.” Kanaya looks very like a teenaged Audrey Hepburn when she tilts her head like that, showing all that luminous almost-white neck, contemplating something. You‘ve seen Breakfast at Tiffany‘s about a dozen times. You even watched The Nun‘s Story just because she was in it even though it bored you half to death and Bec kept farting during the sad parts and ruining the mood.

“Sleep with me,” Terezi decides, speaking up for the first time in a few minutes. She has been playing with a mug of soup at the table, clearly uninterested in actually drinking it but occasionally giving the red mug a contemplative sniff. “You can even borrow one of my scalemates. Senator Lemonsnout has met with an unfortunate end, but I believe he has a nephew who owes me a favor. He will protect your squishy human thinkpan from the godawful shitty singing of the horrorterrors.” She glares. “Or else.”

“Okay. Thanks.” You have no idea what a scalemate even _is_ , but you are sort of suspicious that this is the kind of blissful ignorance that comes before a perseverating nerdstorm. You are used to this feeling. You are friends with a boy who won’t shut up about which Ghostbuster has a cooler voice actor in the cartoon series. No, the _other_ cartoon series. Gosh!

“Fabulous. Come with me and I will braid your distressingly floofy licorice hair the way they do in all the best sleepover literature. We will have the best fun. Bring your rifle.”

“Uh.”

Kanaya to the rescue: “Your species sleeps on elevated flooring, doesn’t it? I’m afraid we don’t have anything like that, but if you’re able to adapt, I believe we have some piles of various stupid soft toys you might fashion into a nest.”

“It’s all right,” you assure them. “I brought my bedroom.” And it was a total bitch getting the whole thing sketched out and captchalogued in only five cards, you don’t add. You’ll be using your Memory modus to unpack it all, especially after that last disaster involving a certain off-brand Tetris clone and several of your favorite houseplants. And a high window. You really liked that window.

“A whole alien respiteblock. You have got to show me this. Can I paint your claws?” Terezi smiles without showing a single tooth. This is how she looks when she is being charming. You are slightly alarmed. You are not sure she wouldn’t just drink the nail varnish. The image sets you to giggling and you feel a little hysterical still. Not good, this is the day everything starts to come together. You can’t spazz out again or they’ll never respect you when the time comes to get each other’s backs.

“Actually, I think I want to just go to sleep. Is that cool? We’ll do the hanging out thing after I stop feeling like a zombie.” Fuck, again with the walking dead references. Kanaya does not look especially offended, although it’s a little hard to be certain with alien faces. They don’t blink nearly as often as humans, for one thing, and Kanaya in particular is even more precise and mannerly than Rose. All that careful propriety just to not look weak. It must be a lot of work.

“I guess I can live with that. Come on, I’ll show you the way.”

“Thank you, Terezi." You yawn again. “G’night, Kanaya. Thanks for, um, having me and my friends over.”

“It’s wonderful to finally meet you.” Kanaya says. “Rest well.”

Terezi shows you down the hallway toward a transportalizer you haven‘t used yet for fear it might spit you out on the surface of the dead troll planet or the Green Sun or something. “You don’t stink or anything, but if you want to visit the ablution room first I think we still have enough detergent gel for everyone. Just don’t use any of the splotchy blue towels.”

“Why not?”

“They’re supposed to be white,” Terezi says, and snorts like a parrot choking on a banana, and won’t explain anything.

 _Trolls._

Another yawn catches you and your breath does that weird shuddery hitching thing it does even a few hours after you’ve had a crying spell. What’s even _up_ with that?

“In the morning,” you decide. “Evening. When I wake up. I think I’d nod off and drown.”

“Right,” she says. “Come on, then, delicious Jade. I’ll introduce you to the Rumpus Family and leave you to your blissful slumber.”

Terezi’s block is accessible through a glowy Libra sign on one of twelve platforms, located down some hallways and up a couple of flights of stairs. When she throws open the door to the space where you will be deploying your worldly belongings, your first glimpse of Terezi Pyrope’s version of a bedroom is every bit as weird and alarming as you expected.

Some of the stuffed dragons are hanging from nooses.

You don’t even fucking ask.

Some short time later, in your dreams, you start to hear the singing again, horrible and metallic and buzzing with awful alien comfort from every direction. You are floating in liquid black nothingness but you can feel _things_ just out of your reach, wanting to reach for you but keeping just enough distance to be invisible. Whatever they are, they are amazed by your presence and there's this cold slow curiosity that you can't begin to understand. You could be wearing a parka and still feel naked. You are being invaded by their intensely needy, completely monstrous attention. It is so not your thing. This grimdark shit has always been Rose's territory and she almost went insane and got killed, except she had her Derse life. You've got nothing left to lose and nothing to hide and one wrong noise out of the darkness could kill you but they just keep singing at you.

At you? _Through_ you! It's not even in your ears, really, more in the spongey insides of your bones and the hollow space inside your chest, all vibrating and thrumming like a loud bassline when you have earplugs in. The awful song is inside your head, too, and you really want to throw up. Can you even puke in a dream?

The worst thing is that you have no secrets from this kind of scrutiny. These things know you more intimately than you know yourself and it doesn't mean a fucking thing to them.

It's horrible.

"Rude much?" you snarl at the beings that have you on their extradimensional tentacly specimen slide. "At least buy me dinner first!"

They don't even know you're talking to them. You are a speck of fleshmatter making tiny meat-noises for incomprehensible reasons. Their song goes _fascinating fascinating it moves it hears us maybe it will sing to us._

How can anything that big be that desperate? How can so many creatures singing the same hideous note be so utterly lonely?

You're already regretting your decision to sleep without the scalemate Terezi offered you. No, fuck that, you really would rather just be awake and miserable for the rest of your life like Karkat than deal with this--

"Oh THERE you are!" A voice, light and familiar and welcoming, cuts through the song and it briefly quiets. "I thought you'd NEVER sleep again after last time!" And there's this glorious rush of color, color, color flashing through the dark around you and it's pink and green and streaks of black again overlaid with bright bright bands of gold. And there she is, swimming before you like this inkwell of dead dreams is nothing worse than a dark pool. She's wearing the same purple swim goggles as Sollux, but her eyes are white and blank instead of all scorched out and yellow-scabby and gross.

"Come this way," Feferi says. "I got a bubble set up just for you."


	9. serious business

Feferi takes you by the hand and kicks her way through the darkness, and even though this is outer space it feels like she’s pulling you through water. Her epic mane streams out behind her, dragging out into the abyss to blend with the darkness there. Stray wisps occasionally tickle your face when she changes course, leading you down. Or possibly it’s up. Whatever. The otherworldly singing slowly grows quieter.

It doesn’t take long before you’re both floating above a glimmering object that you are pretty sure wasn’t there a moment ago. It really does look like a bubble. A huge, huge soap bubble, floating free and luminescent in the dead black, impossibly huge in the endless night. Dim oily rainbows slither around its surface, the tiniest swirls at least the size of any room you’ve seen in the lab so far.

Feferi gives you this completely glorious smile full of glaring white hacksaw teeth. “Come on, human!” she says, and kicks out to bring you both right up against the shining surface. Pink and indigo oilspots cast a wash of shifting color across your face. You can’t see inside, although a moment ago you would have sworn it was completely transparent.

“What _is_ it?” you ask.

“A dreambubble!” Feferi says, and looks annoyed. “Look, we’ve been through this before, remember? This is the furthest ring. You’ve got a dead dreamself now, so this is where you go when you sleep. Or die, I guess. That’s how most of us turned up here.”

“Weren’t you murdered?” No one really talked much about what happened, but you can see the giant hole through her chest no matter how many strings of vividly colored shell beads hang down over the gaping wound. Her ragged flesh and splotched bloodstains are a pink so deep it’s almost red. Then blue, shifting to green in the prismatic light of the dreambubble. Her blood doesn’t look real. Feferi herself doesn’t look real.

“Shore was. I kicked Eridan’s ass so hard when I found his bubble. Then I went and got his upper half and clocked him one in the face for good measure.” She frowns, and it’s pretty and feral at the same time. “I had to spend ages convincing him to put himself back together after he figured out he was dead. That boy can be such a complete pain in the ass.”

“Does dying hurt?” You ask, not sure if this is polite under the circumstances.

“Oh my cod, you have no idea. But it was quick. I was gone before I hit the ground. Or the horn pile, I guess. Kanaya tells me that’s where she found my body.” Feferi places the pinkish-gray palm of her free hand against the bubble, and pushes. The bubble deforms under the pressure, then swallows her hand. “Come on in,” she tells you, and lets go of your other hand. “Just push through, it’s easy.”

You copy her and feel the wall of the bubble open around you, squeezing your arms and legs and face as you slide through the paper-thin barrier. For a moment it’s all white and noise and chaos and you have to scrunch your eyes shut against the brightness, but then your feet find something hard and you look down to find yourself standing beside the Troll girl in what appears to be a perfectly normal bedroom.

Your bedroom.

Your anthro posters are here. And your Squiddles, and your bass guitar leaning on the wall. You can even smell the scented candles you made yourself using local plants and a tutorial off the internet. It’s not a great smell. You weren’t a very good candlemaker. But it’s familiar, and it’s yours.

“I always imagined I’d die somewhere amazing, like fighting the Black King or exploring the universe we made,” Feferi continues, as if nothing worth mentioning has happened outside her reminiscence. “Not flopped out on a bunch of bicycle horns with my guts coming out. Ugh.” She throws herself down on your bed and looks up at you. “Whale?”

“Whale _what?”_

“Sit _down,_ doofus,” she prompts, and pats the bed beside her. “That’s why I made this place. Someplace to sit and chat where you won’t have to listen to our hosts go on and on the whole time.”

You tilt your head and listen. No weird singing to vibrate down in your bones and make you squirm and feel naked. When did that stop?

“Pretty quiet, isn’t it?” Feferi smiles again. “I know it’s hard for you guys to get used to them, so these bubbles are their way to work around that and make everyone feel comfortable.”

“I was in one of these before,” you tell her, “With Aradia and Sollux. Two Aradias, actually. One was a robot. It was kind of funny how they both kept teasing him. He wanted to go find you but then he woke up.”

“Oh, we’ve connected since then,” Feferi says, and makes this weird throaty giggling noise. _“A lot.”_

“Uh. TMI?” You make an abjuring face. Oh for some brain bleach.

“Sorry!” But she’s totally not, and you roll your eyes.

“How many bubbles are there? Is this the same one as before?”

“This one’s new. They’re like seafoam in some places, but then there are big single ones drifting around all alone that look old and are really hard to get into. I climbed through one of those and there was this older troll who looked a lot like another one of us that got killed, sweetest girl I’ve ever known, you’ll meet her later--painting on this huge cliff wall that went on for fathoms. Miles. Whatever. She sort of flipped her shit and threw me out as soon as I said hello. I never saw that bubble again.”

You run a hand across the bed surface. It’s as solid and real as the one you unpacked in Terezi’s respiteblock not long ago. The one your body is sleeping on now. “Are there going to be other people here with us?”

“Just you and me for now,” Feferi says. “But then later you can come back here when you sleep and you might have company. You’ll probably bump into a couple of Daves. It seems like the people you remember best are the ones you’ll meet first and there are kind of a lot of him to go around. Aradia tried explaining how it works once, but I wasn’t the time player for our session, so I just nodded at whatever she said until she stopped talking. I think it’s more exciting to find out for myself, anyway.”

You sit in silence, the two of you, for a total of perhaps thirty seconds before the silence is broken and your doom unleashed.

“Sooooo Jade!” Feferi rolls onto her belly and props her head on her hands, elbows denting the blanket. Her long long eyelashes flutter above those pearl-blank eyes, and she is utterly beautiful in that moment. You don’t trust that face one tiny little bit. You’ve seen her teeth.

“Hmm?” You return her gaze with a raised eyebrow.

“Time to get down to business,” Feferi tells you, and frowns. “Very important business.”

“Oh,” you say, disappointed. “I kind of hoped for a break from the battle strategy meetings, at least when I was asleep...”

“What? _No!”_ Feferi laughs, “What kind of host would I be if I got you all comfy and then whipped out the griefing diagrams on you? I want to talk about actually _important_ stuff.”

“Such as?”

“Such as,” Feferi gives you a look loaded with solemn intensity, _“Boys.”_

“Buh?” The meaning hits you a split second before you faceplant on the bed with a defeated WHUD, hair flying all around you in a tangly black fan as you surrender to your inevitable fate.

No matter what you do, it seems the dreaded sleepover will have its way with you in the end.

“Can we do the battle strategy thing instead?” you plead.

The abdicated Empress flashes another smile and reaches over to pat you on the back of the head. Your nose mashes into the blanket. Jesus, how strong are these trolls, anyway?

 _“Shoooooosh,”_ she says.

You pout.

“So, do you think Sollux is cute?”

This is going to be a long night.


	10. sleepover

  
**> Be the Coolkid.**   


“So when were you planning to kick my ass?” He gives you this look--well, okay, it’s not really a look, more like making a face in your general direction--like he’s pissed you haven’t tried it yet.

You sigh. You were hoping to fall asleep the minute your head hit the pillow, but they paired you off with the Mage of Doom. Either so he can babysit you, or vice-versa. You aren’t really sure which it was, except that Terezi had this smug face on when they decided it all. So yeah, sleep’s just not going to happen.

You think about ignoring him and seeing if maybe he takes the hint. But nah. You finally sit up on your deployed bed (complete with foul sheets you meant to wash three weeks ago, but eh, shit happens) and look across the room to where Sollux sits snuggled up in a pile of his precious alien computer parts. He’s in the dimmest part of the room with his skinny legs crossed and a lapful of circuit board. He is tracing the pins and mounting points with his fingertips, looking at nothing.

“Well?” he prompts.

“I was busy,” you say. He just grimaces and continues to feel around the hardware. One of his freaky purple bees lands on his dirty black hair and walks its tiny six-legged way up one of his weird extra horns. He reaches up to brush it away, but the bug climbs onto one of his fingers instead. He brings it back down before his face and blows a little puff of air across the back of his hand and it sends the bee tumbling. It regains its bearings and begins to buzz around him in wide, contented loops.

“Do your bees know you look at porn all day?” you ask. “Man, I couldn’t fap if I knew a bunch of little slave bugs might be watching. Even if they don’t know what tits are, it would just be weird. How do you even delete your browsing history on a system run on fucking insects?”

He grins and you get an eyeful of jagged monster teeth with black spaces where the front grill’s all broken off down to the gumline. Behind the goggles his eyes are black holes. Like a halloween decoration with the light turned off. A dead jack-o-lantern in gray and black.

“You fucking humans," he snorts, and shakes his head.

“Is that a yes or a no? C’mon, it’s just us guys here. When you pull up some freaky bucket website and start to stroke the ham katana, do your bees all close their eyes at once? Or do they like to watch? This is important because I might want to do a little surfing of my own, and I’m not into cross-species voyeurism. Which I guess is a new idea to you Alternians, what with all those time-travel webcams you’ve been stashing in our bedrooms. But I just want to protect the sanctity of my tender young boner, man. Level with me here. Do the bugs get off on it or do they just sort of lie back and think of Troll England while you get up to your business?”

“You’re a prick,” he says, almost with admiration. “No wonder KK broke all those keyboards talking to you.” his hand comes to rest on a protruding array on the board. It looks like a small piece of honeycomb rendered in shiny green metal. Some kind of weird alien heatsink?

“And yet here you are, chomping at the bit for a chance to hateflirt with my fine ass.”

“What can I say, it was caliginous at first sight.” He yanks a hand back from the heatsink-looking thing, hissing a breath inward. “Fuck, which one of you little assholes just stung me?”

Three more bees emerge from somewhere on the array and buzz something in a one-two pattern. He hums something back and they fly off. Probably heading over to the huge leaking hive he’s got hidden behind a curtain (“They don’t want you looking at them all the time, you freak them out”) in the corner of his block.

“Did you just tell your gay porn bees to gang up on me?”

“No, just a server hiccup. Should be fine now.” he holds the circuit board in front of his face, only this time he doesn’t just stare blindly at it. He gives the spot he’s just found with his fingertip a lick instead. “Hah. Gotcha,” he mutters. “Twenty minutes of looking and you’re right there the whole time, you burnt-out piece of junk." He fumbles to his left, patting the floor with his bee-stung hand while the fingers of the other hand remain firmly pressed on the spot he’s just licked on the board. “Fuck did I put the solder?”

“A little more to the left,” you say, and he predictably shifts his search to the right. “Other left, brain hero.” He finally gets his hands on the little gray tube and yanks the cap off with one of his surviving teeth. “Gnf,” he says. This might be thanks, or another insult. Either way it comes to the same. You watch him struggle to line up the tip of the tube with the area he’s trying to fix. It’s sort of painful to watch, and it seems to go on forever.

“Dude, do you want a hand with that?”

His head whips up. He gives you the full benefit of his dead halloween mask face, black with anger. “Fuck off, human,” he snarls. “This is what I do.”

“Just sayin’," you shrug. “If you need the practice, that’s cool."

“Condescending simian dipshit.You’d just fuck it up or chew on it or something,” Sollux leans down over the board and fingerwalks his way back to where the connection is fried, and very carefully dabs a shiny green blob onto the surface. The single bee that has been doing a slow orbit around him for the past five minutes descends and begins crawling along the board. You can hear it buzz from across the room in the silence. It doesn’t sound happy. He hums something back and the bee’s response is a terse rattle before it resumes its circling.

That’s it. Reality is canceled, everyone out of the pool. You are watching a blind troll lose an argument to a bee.

“Fuck," he finally says. “Fucking FUCK." He uses a corner of his shirt to wipe the solder off the board and starts over. “Fuck. This is elementary level shit. This is like. The first thing a grub learns when its vestigials fall off and it climbs its worthless ass into its first husktop chair to bang on the keys and drool all over itself. The easiest goddamn thing and I can’t even do that. Good work, asshole. Fuck.”

You let him go on like that for a while. If he wants help, he’ll eventually get around to asking, or just smash the goddamn board across the floor like he’s pitching baby’s first bitchfit and solve the problem the troll way. None of your concern.

Yet he somehow still manages to incorporate you into his ranting.

“Lousy stupid goddamn power surges and I don’t even have enough spare batteries to keep half these fucking things running, I can’t even work like this when I can see, there’s just fucking wires everywhere getting ripped out and frayed and shorting out causing fucking chaos all over the lab. Fuck this. Fuck you. I walked up to your fucking moirail and socked him one in the stenchnub and you just let me. What the fuck is wrong with you, Dave Strider, you smug shithead?”

“Call me crazy, but I’m just not that jazzed about beating up on a blind guy.” You don't mention the part where you were going to do just that until Terezi got you running around like an idiot.

“Eat shit, human,” he shoots back, and his hands are trembling so badly he has to set the board and the open tube of solder on the floor. “Your pink hairless newborn mammal-looking ass can die in a grease fire. Fuck you and fuck your species and fuck whoever invented silicomb twice sideways with a goddamn pruning saw. I don’t want your help or your pity, Strider, bother someone who’s interested and leave me the fuck alone.”

“Aiight, whatevs. Have fun wrecking that motherboard all night long.”

He lets out a strangled cry. "Ugh, fine, fuck you, here. If it'll shut you up."

You’re up and over to his tech pile in one move, taking the board from his hands. His knuckles are all bashed up and he has bits of solder under his weird pointy troll nails. His stalker-bee lands on his horn again and he lets it stay there, facing you with blank contempt written all over his face.

You dab a tiny dot of solder on the spot where the connection is fried, and the bees don’t even bother to check your work. “How long does this have to sit?”

“Couple hours. Here.” He takes it back and sets it on the top of the pile. “I could have kicked your shit off this asteroid a week ago, you know that?” he mutters, looking down at the lap he can’t see.

“Omnia mutantur, spooky.”

“Did you just call me a mutant?”

“Sure, why not.”


End file.
